NAS Specs and Speeds

[Alterac]

I figured a post about everyone NAS solution and the speed of the array would be a nerdy interesting post.

I figure a hdparm -t /dev/array for linux, and maybe hdtach for the windows users would be good results to post.

So I will start

Chenbro ES34069 Mini-ITX NAS Case
Intel Mini-itx Atom 330 Motherboard
Gigabit Network onboard
CF to SATA Drive adapter for Solid state OS drive 4GB
Promise SATA300 TX4 - 4 Port SATA-II Card
4x 1 TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 7200rpm drives
OpenFiler as OS
Array is RAID5 with 64K chunk size

Quick Speed Test of the Array:

Code:

[root@raid5 ~]# hdparm -t /dev/md0
/dev/md0:
Timing buffered disk reads:  284 MB in  3.01 seconds =  94.34 MB/sec

What does everyone else have? (I know what halfelite has, so im gonna be completly shamed by his awesome setup)

[tux99]

Antec Sonata case
Gigabyte MA770-UD3 mobo, AMD 4850e dual-core cpu
4x1TB WD GP drives (5400 rpm)
1x160GB old IDE Maxtor hdd for OS
Mandriva Linux

Code:

hdparm -t /dev/md1
/dev/md1:
Timing buffered disk reads:  610 MB in  3.01 seconds = 202.96 MB/sec

Alterac, I think your Raid is not well setup, it should be faster than that...
Edit: actually I know why it's that slow, you have all 4 drives hanging off the PCI bus instead of PCI-e, why don't you use the onboard SATA connectors? If you move at least two drives onto the onboard SATA connectors it will be a lot faster!

[dc11ab]

Lundmans "lraid5" NAS project based on Opensolaris ZFS:
# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/data/bigfile4 bs=64k count=10000
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6.1G Aug 1 17:34 bigfile4
real 0m18.391s
347.02 MB/s

[tux99]

(08-27-2009 06:19 PM)dc11ab Wrote:  Lundmans "lraid5" NAS project based on Opensolaris ZFS:
# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/data/bigfile4 bs=64k count=10000
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6.1G Aug 1 17:34 bigfile4
real 0m18.391s
347.02 MB/s

There you are measuring the filesystem speed, that's not comparable to hdparm -t which measures the raw device speed!
(although I suspect it will still be very fast)

[dc11ab]

True, and there are some iozone test results available at his project's homepage too, fwiw.

[Alterac]

(08-27-2009 06:14 PM)tux99 Wrote:  Alterac, I think your Raid is not well setup, it should be faster than that...
Edit: actually I know why it's that slow, you have all 4 drives hanging off the PCI bus instead of PCI-e, why don't you use the onboard SATA connectors? If you move at least two drives onto the onboard SATA connectors it will be a lot faster!

Yea, my drives are on a PCI controller and not the onboard connectors (only have 2 onboard connectors, with 1 free) even tho theoreticaly the card and pci bus could run at 66mhz, i think its locked at 33.

I would like to upgrade the board eventually to something with 4 (or more) onboard sata, and pci-e bus, but still have the low power of the atom board.

[tux99]

(08-27-2009 06:45 PM)Alterac Wrote:  Yea, my drives are on a PCI controller and not the onboard connectors (only have 2 onboard connectors, with 1 free) even tho theoreticaly the card and pci bus could run at 66mhz, i think its locked at 33.

I would like to upgrade the board eventually to something with 4 (or more) onboard sata, and pci-e bus, but still have the low power of the atom board.

Then move at least one drive to on-board, you will likely already notice a speed increase, the PCI bus can only handle 132MB/s (theoretical maximum across all PCI devices, including on board stuff using the PCI bus) so it's a big bottle-neck on your system. With Linux raid moving a disk to another connector is plug-n-play, no need to reconfigure anything (as long as you have used a wildcard DEVICE config in /etc/mdadm.conf).
With your 7200rpm drives you should achieve a higher throughput than me, as my WD GP drives are 'only' 5400rpm (but they are more than fast enough for a media server).

[Alterac]

So that would releive some of the stress on the pci bus, and allow it all to work faster i suppose.

Well i will give it a shot tonight and see what I can break.

[tux99]

(08-27-2009 07:22 PM)Alterac Wrote:  So that would releive some of the stress on the pci bus, and allow it all to work faster i suppose.

Well i will give it a shot tonight and see what I can break.

Just comment out the mount point from /etc/fstab before rebooting, to be safe, but you shouldn't experience any problems. I originally build my raid on a different mobo and also with a PCI SATA card for 2 of the drives and it transferred across to the new mobo (and all on-board SATA) without any issues.

[halfelite]

my turn my turn

Code:

hdparm -t /dev/sda1

/dev/sda1:
Timing buffered disk reads:  990 MB in  3.00 seconds = 329.98 MB/sec

Running an areca ARC-1130 PCI-X SATA II card. With the battery backup unit. To enable write ahead access. And 2 gigs of cache to help with that write head. Right now its running With 8 seagate 1tb drives.

Motherboard is a cheap $40 buck msi board running intel core 2. Also with 2gig of ram. and gigabit nic ports. The linux os is housed on a separate drive running off the mobo sata.